Housing in Alaska can’t survive climate change. This group is trying a new model
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Francis Waskey’s house used to stand four feet above ground on wooden stilts. Now, the mud underneath it has swallowed them whole. As the posts sank over the years into the thawing, carbon-rich frozen soil known as permafrost, Waskey tried propping up the 28-by-36-foot wooden structure with two empty propane tanks, to no avail. The ground shifted so much that the vinyl floor split apart. Nails popped out of the floorboards. The windows shattered, leaving Waskey — a Yupik native who grew up in the home with his family and remained after his parents passed — with icy drafts through subzero winters.
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After five decades, the house, which was never built to thrive in the extreme climate of southwest Alaska, will be torn down. Waskey’s home, like so many across the state, was thrown up during the economic boom of the trans-Alaska Pipeline, one of the world’s largest oil pipelines that transformed Alaska into a petroleum state during the 1970s and fueled a homebuilding frenzy. But these homes were imported from the temperate Lower 48, designs so incompatible with Alaska’s northern environment that they’ve fueled a statewide housing crisis. To make matters worse, Waskey’s house was built on permafrost, the layer of frozen organic material covering 80% of Alaska that is thawing rapidly and accelerating the demise of anything built on top of it, including the pipeline itself.
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In the case of Mountain Village, the Asa’carsarmiut Tribal Council cold called the CCHRC two years ago to discuss the its primary challenges: failing foundations and overcrowding. It’s not uncommon for two to four families to live in the same three-bedroom house; throughout the village, insulation is rotting, ceilings are separating from walls, and crooked piles support collapsing floors. Residents will use anything to keep their houses from subsiding: ATV drums, concrete slabs, wood cribbing like Jenga blocks. When the floors give way, residents use blankets and sleeping bags to choke off the cold air.
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On the banks of the Yukon River in Mountain Village, there was nothing but a taut electrical wire holding a house on the slope from tumbling into the silty water. Even a 10-by-20-foot wooden house was too much for the posts underneath. It lacks electricity or running water, but it’s warm and mold free, and Waskey needs a home while his new one is constructed. So Ron Lawrence, 46, a house-maintenance worker with the tribe, scoured the village for a metal beam, screwed it to the base of the house, and chained it up to a loader parked uphill. The house only needed to move two feet back into place. Lawrence looked in his rearview mirror, waited for the OK from his team, and quickly tapped the accelerator. “Lo and behold, the house moved,” Lawrence recounts. “We were all shaking.”
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